For more than three hundred years, Block Island had a thriving agriculture, including a great deal of livestock such as cattle, pigs, and chickens. The cattle and pigs are mostly, if not entirely, gone now. The pastures have become suburban yards, and food comes from the mainland via ferry.
There are, however, still a few farms, like this one in Beacon Hollow.
This farm made wine, among other things, but I didn't get to taste any while I was there. Most of the surviving farms keep horses, and do business selling horse rides to tourists. Here are a couple of friendly horses that I encountered on one farm on the island's southeast corner.
This same farm also had a good number of birds. Chickens are kept to produce fresh eggs. I'm not sure whether the ducks are domesticated, or just like to hang around with the chickens, but it was interesting seeing them together.
Here's a nice picture of some ducks and ducklings in a roadside pond.
And there are some more wild animals on the island as well. This sign was placed as an amusing way to keep trespassers off someone's property, but it's also a reminder that there are wild deer on the island. I wasn't able to get a picture of any deer, but I did see one -- in fact, almost ran into it on my bicycle during an early morning ride.
Now, the presence of deer raises an interesting question: how did they get there, and when? They couldn't have walked there. The last time this island was connected to the mainland had to be during the last ice age, and an isolated population of deer would have been hunted to extinction when humans came to the island. Over the water doesn't seem to be an option either. I can't imagine a single deer swimming across miles of open ocean and finding the island, never mind enough of them to form a sustainable breeding population. Other ideas, such as a community of deer floating across on a raft of driftwood, or deer seeds being blown across from the mainland, are rather implausible. The only reasonable possibility is that a good-sized population of deer was deliberately brought across by people in relatively recent times. There must be an interesting story behind that, but I wasn't able to track it down while I was there. Maybe it will be a research project for my next visit.
Click here to return to the Slackwood Home Page.
Click here to return to the Index of Pictures.
Click here to return to the Block Island Index.